In November 2019, Perrotin gallery announced that Maurizio Cattelan, The mischievous provocateur who dominates the art world, has made his first new work for an art fair in 15 years. It is called Comedian.
“Maurizio Cattelan is known for his surreal sculptures that lampoon popular culture and provide satirical commentary on society, power and authority,” the gallery said in a press release. which initially went largely unnoticed. “Composed of a real banana stuck to the wall with a piece of gray Scotch tape, this new piece is no different. Similar to Cattelan’s America (2016), this work provides insight into how we assign value and the types of objects we evaluate.”
The statement explains that Cattelan spent a year creating a sculpture of a banana. He tried painting plastic, then bronze, then bronze, before “finally coming back to the original idea of a real banana.”
When Emmanuel PerrotinThe gallery first taped a banana to the wall of its booth at Art Basel Miami Beach on December 4 of that year (actually using tape to tape), which was an instant sensation for the audience. with First Choice preview attendees. comedian became the most Instagrammable work at the world’s most Instagrammable art fair as two versions quickly sold for $120,000 ahead of Perrotin according to the report messaged the artist and asked if he could increase the price to $150,000. There was also immediate outrage that someone could…stick a banana on a wall, call it art, and sell it for six figures. Some people came to eat bananas at the fair to protest. (The gallery just replaced it. The certificate that accompanied the work said that the banana could be replaced at any time and that they had a spare banana.)
And then New York Post Office placing the work on the cover, ensures its permanence. “Banana! The art world went crazy,” wood read.
Five years later, that $150,000 price tag now seems downright modest. On Wednesday night at Sotheby’s in New York, seven bidders gave chase comedian well above the $1.5 million estimate until a client got on the phone with Sotheby’s vice president for Asia Jen Hua came in with a bid of $5.2 million, the fee came to $6.2 million, shocking the packed sales room.
How did we get here, to the point where a 35-cent banana taped to the wall sells for the price of the most expensive house in Cleveland?
Courtesy of the New York Post Office.
Let’s take a step back. When I first received the Perrotin preview for Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019 and saw comedian, it strikes me as an archetypal work by the artist, a senior Cattelan. And the $120,000 price tag seems pretty…reasonable? Maybe even a bargain?
Cattelan’s auction record is $17.2 million – that’s the value of a statue with a name He, it’s a little Hitler—and some of his predecessorscomedian ready-made products sold seven figures. Dad, Dad, Pinocchio toy lying face down in a puddle, sold for $1.2 million. ostrich, just a stuffed ostrich, sold for £1.5 million. Here’s a new work of art by an artist who retired from the Guggenheim retrospective in 2011, and it’s a particularly striking one: The combination of industrial gray duct tape and cooked flesh Soft yellow banana is super punk rock and unforgettable music. . It’s a nod to one of my personal favorite Cattelan works: A perfect day, in which he duct tapes his salesman, Massimo De Carlo, to his gallery wall and kept him aloft throughout opening day.
